Google and 20 of its closest friends are trying to give container orchestration an interoperability boost with the creation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the first production release of Kubernetes, Google's open source platform for container orchestration.

Both announcements were made this morning in Portland, Oregon, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon). The CNCF is yet another open source initiative, one that will focus on orchestration interoperability, using APIs to link disparate container services and applications.

It's a recognition that the existence of Kubernetes does not complete the container orchestration puzzle — and it might also be a way for other major players to get a voice in the future of orchestration. Kubernetes is open source, but it's still a project run by, and closely associated with, Google.

So, the CNCF is kicking off with 21 vendors and organizations behind it. The names, if you must know, are (deep breath): AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Switch SUPERNAP, Twitter, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks.

Docker, with its natural interest in spreading the gospel of containers, is backing the CNCF initiative to allay fears that picking the wrong orchestration system will lock containerized applications out of cloud architectures that use other approaches.

"There's a lot of innovation right now at the [container] orchestration layer, lots of players who have different approaches," says Patrick Chanezon, a member of the technical staff at Docker. "The goal of the project is to create these reference stacks that orchestration engines can use to interoperate."

For example, he adds, you would be able to use Kubernetes as a scheduler for Docker Swarm.

Like the OpenDaylight Project, the CNCF will be organized under the Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project.

Kubernetes, meanwhile, has launched to production. Its 1.0 release actually got posted to Github 10 days ago, and the current 1.0.1 production release went up four days ago.

Kubernetes contributors met in February to hammer out the details of version 1.0. Among the features touted on today's blog post by Google are:

  • Production-level niceties including DNS and load balancing
  • The ability to group containers in pods for more efficient updating
  • API responses of less than five seconds on average
  • Clamed scaling capabilities of thousands of containers per cluster

CoreOS made sure it didn't get left out of the excitement. The company announced a preview version of Tectonic, a prepackaged Kubernetes implementation that comes with a user dashboard.